 So, and welcome to today's session of the AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm delighted to introduce our next guests to highlight the award for best partner, transformation, best telco solution. And of course I'm your host, Natalie Erlich for theCUBE. We are now joined by Abhishai Charlene, division president at Amdox Technology and Ralph Hellebrand, program director of technology at Vodafone Germany. Thank you gentlemen for joining the program. Thank you for having us. It's perfect. Well, let's have the opening question for both of you. You know, but let's first start with Abhishai. What has been the highlight to date in the journey of both Amdox and Vodafone? Well, it's a good question. I believe that the highlight was the teaming and getting things done together as partners. Unlike many previous experiences, this time we understood that the success equals us working hand in hand together, making sure that we overcome and achieve everything as true partners. So the greatest obstacles and also the biggest achievement were done together as one team. We always speak about the hurdles. We negotiate sometimes, but eventually we're coming to the solution together and making sure that everything is properly managed and properly done in the right timing and according to plans. Terrific. Well, Ralph, let's go to you. What do you see as the highlights of this collaboration? Now, exactly what Abhishai said, but let me add to that. What we are following is a real collaborative approach. Now, there's a lot of strengths in that approach because we are using, for example, swarm intelligence. We are using elements which you see in cloud attempts as well, for example, but you see it in agile attempts and agile working methods. And this is what we apply. And as Abhishai said, we are doing that as real partners in the program and we are pulling a lot of strengths out of that by detecting problems early. We have a high level of transparency. We put everything on the table and differences that we do not fight about the problems. We work collaborative on the solution and that's really kind of new to the industry we are working in. And that's kind of game-changing for it. At the beginning, we said it will be game-changing if it works, now we see that it does. Terrific. Well, why do you think, generally speaking, that the telco industry has been so slow to embrace these kinds of innovations? Let's start with Abhishai. It's less about, I think, the actual technology. It's more about a handful of parameters that need to be aligned once you try to address these big transformations. You need to upscale a lot of people. You need to educate your manpower to new technologies and new ways and processes, how to embrace DevOps, how to work in a cloud environment, how to embrace an agile, safe methodology. So there are many small pockets of things that need to be changed. Not a single element actually is the same as like five years ago. So in a way, if the organization as a whole is not being transformed, it's very tough to embrace all those new technologies and succeed in such a journey. So for us, and I think also to our partners in Vodafone, it was a mutual understanding that we need to not just work together, but also tackle the new technologies and methods and processes all together and change the entire organization and ecosystem in order to succeed. In many other cases in the industry, we see that some pockets are not being changed. And then even if the technology is right, you are missing the upscaling of people. If you upscale the people and you forgot the technology and so on and so forth. Perfect. Now, Ralph, I'd love for you to respond to that question as well. So the telco industry is a quite complex industry. If you look to the product, it seems to be quite easy. You pick up a phone and you do a phone call or you go to the internet and so on and so forth. But if you think of all the services which you're using via your smartphone, for example, it's far away from just doing a phone call. So at the same time where the telco industry is producing and selling products, it's producing and selling services. At the same time, while you're using it for leisure, you're also using it for emergency calls. So there's a high level of safety which we need to bring and we need to pair it with a lot of innovation elements, both together. Now, if you take all this and you think of the complexity, it's not easy to introduce new methods and new ways of working, et cetera, to such an industry. Again, you need to take two things into account. You need to make it very safe and stable and educated and controlled. And at the same time, you need to be very fast because it's a fast moving industry. And both together explains how we adopt it and why sometimes we are a bit slower than others because the try and error is not that easy because the error cannot be allowed in big scale. The more I'm happy that in the approach we are taking together with some docs and also AWS, we can apply these new methods while keeping the safety and stability. Terrific. Well, thank you for outlining that safety methodology. Avishai, I'd like to move this back to you. How are you redefining this operation through DevOps and automation? Well, that's an interesting question. I think that automation needs to be baked into almost everything that we're doing in such a transformation. It starts from the basic technology stuff, but it goes into all the processes, the way you develop, the way you test, the way you deploy, the way later on you're making sure that everything runs in the right way. So automation is key fundamental element in the end-to-end journey of such a big transformation, especially if you're going into agile development and you need to fail fast, react fast, change fast, and then continue onwards with a new solution. So first, as you rightfully said, it's automation and DevOps is also key over here because you need to make sure that what you develop is also something that you deploy in the right way. So you need to put in place all the right mechanism, such as infra as a code and the cloud frameworks and the relevant different technologies that are adhering into this end-to-end solution. Perfect. Now, Ralph, what are your thoughts? How are you redefining the operation now through DevOps and automation? We are trying to solve a paradox. Again, the paradox is we want to have things very stable that would dictate us to do very detailed plans and to adhere to it and so on. This is what we did in the past. It fostered, for example, Taylorism and similar things. Now we want to go a step further. We want to apply agile methods. We want to dismantle the Taylorism and the techniques around DevOps, cloud operation, et cetera, agile methods help us to do that. Now, while we are transforming our way of working, we don't want to lose the good elements of what we have been doing before. We want to do a step forward and not at the same time step back. And therefore we are combining things. And automation, for example, is one way to do that. DevOps is another way to do that. We are joining the good thinking of operations and the good thinking of development together. And we are pulling additional strengths out of that while not taking into account or taking on board the weaknesses of the former approach. So it's a stepwise transformation we are following. Automation helps us to focus on the real problems and not on the things you can automate by technology. Terrific. Well, now, Abishai, bringing this back to you. Ralph talks about agility and also DevOps. Explain the journey to date on such a large program. The journey, in what sense? Can you give me some coloring? Yeah, tell us about this collaboration and keeping that in mind, keeping in mind agility as well as DevOps. You know, the step-by-step process in developing such a large collaborative program. Yeah, clear enough. Thank you for clarification. So I think that the journey as a whole had several components. Ralph was leading and myself also at the beginning about the nature of being true partners here. But it is also about establishing something very new in the industry. Many of the things that we're working on are the first time that we're doing agile manner of developing software and testing it so fast. It's the first time we're implementing the latest and greatest DevOps technologies. The first time we're adhering into new standards and behavior from a modernized technology organization. So in a way, this journey is all about a mixture of innovation, new stuff on one hand, aligned with a very, very tight, in a good way I would call it, German engineering in the sense of making sure the things are in place and making sure that the processes are well-defined and we're seeing at any given point the different status we're in, what needs to be improved, what is going well and what future lies ahead. And staying with that topic on the journey opening to both of you and perhaps Ralph will like to jump in here first. How have AWS technologies been featured as part of this journey? AWS has been chosen wisely by us because of its technology components brought to the table. Now, without now pointing to a particular service which we are using, we talked about automation. We talked about DevOps. Now everyone can look itself about how AWS in general helps to foster that. The sheer fact that we can merge the different way of working with a different mindset of people working in our collaboration and technology components coming not only but also from AWS. This is ensuring our success. If you would pull out one of these elements out of the equation, then most probably it would not work. I have problems to rate which element is more important. They are all part of the puzzle and otherwise you would not see the picture and create the picture. So in a nutshell, we are utilizing the AWS technologies in order to allow the speed of development lots of first times which we have in our collaboration and the AWS technologies are an essential part of that. What are your thoughts on that? I think that the collaboration with AWS goes in a way different shapes and form. On the pure technology level, we are utilizing native EKS, we are moving with the managed Kubernetes, we are using the latest technology in databases and many other very cool technologies coming from AWS. On a completely different level, I think that AWS understands the behavior of a complex enterprise and our assisting us with programs looking into well architected framework and how to work in a managed environment and what are the technologies that we need to utilize. And also in a from an Amdox perspective something that assisted us a lot in this journey, we have a unique technology which defines an end-to-end solution to development within a micro-service cloud-native environment, we call it M360. AWS assisted us a lot in making this a mature technology and allowing us to develop faster and fully utilize the benefits of cloud-native environments. Terrific, now to both of you what do you see as the next step in your collaboration together? Let's bring this to Ralph. There is no distinct next step and maybe this is a consequence of the way of working we have established. There are many small steps we will pursue and most probably if you want to know which are the next steps, you need to talk to our teams. This is another aspect of this new way of working which we apply. The people working in that approach, they tell us how they construct, how they structure this approach. If I would summarize it we are constantly tearing down the walls between the companies, between silos between the partners working in that collaboration and we are getting more close together every day and solving problems quicker. We are getting them quicker on the table. We are getting them quicker and faster and faster. AWS and DOCS are part of this and this is really nice to see and be part of but this is really happening. The next step is foster the collaboration. Avishar, do you have any thoughts? On a personal level I think the next step would be to glide together in Europe but on a more serious note I think that this is becoming like a true partnership and I think that I see a lot of empowerment coming from both sides allowing the team to develop together to think together and to start to create new stuff that even if you plan ahead you would never achieve without true collaboration. So this empowerment, the fact that the teams feel that they can do things on their own and make one on one equals three or seven is the big change that I see in front of us and I really feel it in the air and I also feel it in the way we act and we move forward. Yeah, so Ralph how do you see that this program will enable continuous innovation? Oh, it does already. So if you're looking to big transformation programs of the past where lots of them actually did not achieve what they were asked to achieve usually big programs do big plans and then you have a very long period of preparation and then usually you have a rather big bang or life and then everything shall be fine that sometimes work but most times it's difficult. Now within our program we are doing that in collaboration but step by step by step and it's more an evolution than a revolution which we are doing at least in the way we deploy things. Again, we are back to DevOps continuous integration continuous deployment and so on all these elements which you can see in these approaches and this is where the wheel swings lies. So it's evolving step by step and it's bringing benefits step by step. So the benefits are already in place to a certain extent and they're constantly growing. Terrific, Abhishei, what are your thoughts? How do you see the innovation being able to continue and even further? In a way where in the world that everything is in continuum. So it's continuous delivery and continuous development and also continuous innovation. As long as the ecosystem of ours continues to innovate as a whole we are part of it and inevitably we are part of the larger ecosystem on one end and also players within it on a smaller scale in this project and as organization. So I think innovation is baked into everything we're doing today. Sometimes it's a small incremental step and sometimes it's big innovative moves, but all in all it's something that is currently part of our DNA. And how is the system helping you both be more proactive either one of you who would like to go first? Abhishei? No, I started first. Okay. So we are data-driven we are way more data-driven and by knowing exactly what is happening we can be faster, we can be more innovative, we can be more corrective. So in cases where we either discover a problem or we discover an opportunity we are much faster in analyzing whether it's real one how shall we react on that how can we solve it or utilize it and that's really working well. Perfect. Abhishei, feel free to join in on that too. In the digitized economy I think that productivity comes a lot from the business side. If there is something that completely changed lately business people are driving many, many changes on one end and technology is here to adhere on one end and flexible to move forward. So many of the proactive concepts are coming from non-technology savvy people and the ability of what we're doing together to adjust and support different business behaviors and business models and also business initiatives is part of us being proactive and being able to adapt into the digitized economy. Let me join in on that one what Abhishei said. Let's think of a business person who wants to change something and you don't know whether it's a white way as a corporation. Now you bring in the technology bits and pieces from different angles and you can combine it with a data-driven approach. Then you know much better how to react on this business demand and how to bring it to life by using technology. That may be a very high level of example of what we are doing here. Again, collaboration get it done together is the theme of that. Technology is a very important part of that paired with the business. We talked on some very broad terms or themes, collaboration and innovation. I just want to focus a bit now on automation. Why do you think it is so critical to the vision of this program Abhishei? First of all because it ends with Asian everything that has this but I think that we started with automation is fundamental to everything that needs to be nimble everything that needs to be fast. You cannot do it manually and if you want to react either to a business demand or to data-driven decision analytic decision if you want to adopt new technology if you want to test a new business scenario or a technology scenario you need automation to be part inevitable part of everything that you are doing. Automation is a key element in everything that we are doing and it is a critical part of also the way to look into the future and to make sure that everything is working in the right way. Perfect Ralph, any quick thoughts on that? Actually nothing to add. It has been so wonderful to have you on the program. I know people are coming in from all over the world to join us. Really fantastic opportunity to highlight this important innovation in the telco sector. Glad to have you here, Ralph Hellebrand program director of technology at Vodafone Germany as well as Abhishei Charlene the division president at Amdox Technology. We were highlighting the award as part of the AWS global public sector partner awards so great to have you on the show and I'm your host Natalie Erlich do stay tuned for more coverage.